our newest feature project

Love & Tonic is an anthology film of seven intimate, character-driven two-handers, all inspired by the names of popular cocktails. Virgin Mary / Fruit Tingle / A Stiff Dick / Cool Breeze / Vampire’s Kiss / Sex on the Beach / Milk of Amnesia. All of the action is set in a little cocktail bar hidden away on the second floor of a boutique hotel.

A place called Bernard’s.

All of the vignettes — each turning on a new late-night encounter — play out like tracks in a favorite playlist, dropping us in on awkward collisions between strangers who bump into each other at exactly the right (or wrong) moment. Each capturing the rush and sting of modern relationships.

As one reader put it:

“Told with smart, pointed dialogue and a poignant understanding of the human condition, Love & Tonic is a raucous celebration of the beautifully messy ways in which people try — and so often fail — to connect. It’s a tantalizing low-budget indie that’s two parts Alexander Payne, one part Coen Brothers.”

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THREE-TIME “BEST COMEDY” AWARD WINNER

Following its premiere at the L.A. Shorts International Film Festival, our short film Curtains went on to screen at more than two dozen festivals
— taking home three “Best Comedy” awards and a “Best Actor” win for Brendan Dowling for his portrayal of Peter Fleming, an embattled avant-garde theatre director who refuses to compromise his artistic integrity no matter the cost.

The 25 minute-short — written, directed and produced by ideafarmfilms principals Gar and Beth Hoover — was done on a shoestring budget to showcase the world and main character of a series project of the same name that we were pitching at the time.

We were surprised, frankly, that our cheeky little narrative about a die-hard purist in a sellout world — Peter — would end up touching so many people.

The film received multiple wins and award nominations, including Best Cinematic Writing, Best Short Narrative, Best Trailer and Best Supporting Actor for the film’s co-star Chris Woolsey, playing the combative journalist tasked with documenting the rise and fall of Subcutaneous Theatre.

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a different kind of religious experience

You can never know where the next great idea is going to come from.

In the case of The Oblate, it came one morning in our kitchen while we were making ourselves laugh, riffing on Gregorian chants. Within an hour, Thomas, a doughy twentysomething momma’s boy, a follower of Jediism, an Obi-Wannabe, appeared on the scene demanding that his story be told.

By week’s end, we had a short script about Thomas’s trials and tribulations as a newbie in a rural Wisconsin monastery that went on to win a handful
of short script awards. We thought — hmm — we might have something good here. Straight down from heaven had come Thomas’s origin story.

With that in hand, we got to work developing a series about a brotherhood of monks — not real monks, ersatz monks — refugees from failed lives on the outside — enjoying the easy life as “men of god.” Weaving baskets. Making wine. Pretending to pray. Sharing the place with a kindly old Abbot and a hot young Lay Sister who longs to be one of the boys.

It seemed that they’d had the whole fake monk thing pretty grooved. That is, until the “true-believer” Thomas arrived, seeking enlightenment. For real.

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An unconventional THRILLER

Alec Palmer has been a mob enforcer for most of his life — a beast of a man frighteningly good at what he does. But lately there’s been a change in him, something deep that, night by night, has been muscling its way to into his consciousness.

And he hasn’t been sleeping.

As the story opens, Alec is visited by an entity, a spirit, a kind of badass Mother Teresa — an emissary from The Beyond — who seems to peer directly into Alec’s soul. She comes with a warning: “God has some serious shit in store for you, my friend,” she says. “Some serious, momentous shit. You’re going to pay for what you’ve done.”

Is this real or just a disturbing vision?

It doesn’t matter. Alec knows the evil he’s done. The pain he’s inflicted. Now, faced with an eternity spent in the “flames and fiery streams” he has
a choice to make. Continue doing what he’s being paid to do, or “light a candle.” He’s taken many lives. Now it’s up to him to save one.

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the hed goes here

The original version of this project, submitted to screenplay competitions under a different title, just may be one of the winningest scripts around — having won three grand prize awards in a single year, each with a $10K purse attached. We can’t know for certain, but it’s our guess that no script has ever duplicated that. So please allow us this little humble brag ;)

The story follows a classically trained theatre actress in LA aging out of real acting work now that she’s on the cusp of 30. Having come up through the Off-off-Broadway theatre scene she’s been toughing it out, taking anything that comes along to pay rent — but it’s wearing on her.

It seems she can’t get a break. Until she does. That’s when her troubles begin. During a walk-on TV role, she goes off-script and, in character as a feminist warrior, speaks her truth to an audience of overlooked women in what has to be one of the most electrifying moments in television history.

But what about the cowboy?

At the start, she dismisses him as an annoying, overly amorous hick. Only to discover in time that there’s something about him that makes her happy.

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